The long road

By: 
Travis Fischer

Age of the Geek Column: Last month I said upgrading a computer is never easy.
That was an understatement.
As you may remember, last August I decided it was time to give my computer a major upgrade, swapping out the decade old motherboard and processor with the current latest and greatest components.
The upgrade wasn't as simple as I'd hoped it would be. As it turns out, a hard drive can be rather particular about which motherboard it boots up on. Getting my computer up and running required a fresh install of Windows, which I was loathe to do, but at least I got it to boot up.
I had thought that the most aggravating part of the process was over.
I was wrong.
The primary purpose of upgrading my computer was to improve my ability to capture game footage and edit video. Video editing has become my primary hobby in recent years and I was looking forward to being able to reliably capture video in high definition and quickly render with my speedy new CPU.
So imagine my dismay when I discovered that capturing video or running video editing software consistently resulted in my newly upgraded computer completely freezing up. Because the universe loves irony, something about the upgrade resulted in my computer being unable to perform the tasks I had explicitly upgraded it for.
Thus began a month long exercise in frustration as I troubleshot every possible reason for the problem.
At first I thought it might be the heatsink, which it turns out had been damaged during the transfer. I replaced it with a brand new water cooled heat pump. It keeps my CPU nice and cool, but it didn't fix the problem.
I thought maybe there was a problem with my hard drive, so I replaced it with a new solid state drive. Now my computer boots up lightning quick, but it didn't fix the problem.
I thought maybe the motherboard was defective so I ordered a replacement and had that reinstalled. It didn't fix the problem.
After troubleshooting as much as I could manage, I took it to the professionals. Twice I was assured they had discovered the problem and twice it turned out they were wrong. They swapped out nearly every component in the machine but couldn't narrow down the source of the issue.
Then, for no reason I can discern, the problem went away.
On Friday, my computer was still freezing up whenever I tried running my editing software or capturing video. Four days later when I took it back to the computer repair store for another round of troubleshooting, I could no longer reproduce the error.
The good news, my computer seems to be fine now.
The bad news, I have no idea why. After a month of updating drivers, installing new hardware and various troubleshooting, still I don't know what caused my computer to freeze, why it's not freezing anymore, or what I would need to do if the problem returns.
The worse news, because the universe really loves irony, whatever fixed my computer's freezing problem also completely broke my copy of Adobe Premiere Elements 12, my reluctantly preferred video editing software. Over a weekend I randomly went from having a computer that froze whenever I used my video editing software to a computer that didn't freeze, but also wouldn't load my video editing software.
So after all the hassle, the one thing left to do was to "upgrade" to the latest version of Adobe Premiere Elements. I say "upgrade" in sarcastic quotations because the "geniuses" at Adobe don't seem to understand what the term means.
I've used four versions of Premiere over the years and each time I've "upgraded" to the latest version I immediately discover it has fewer tools and functions than its predecessor. In going from version 6 to 10, I found that Adobe somehow managed to forget how to create animated GIFs. Going from 10 to 12, they decided the Time Stretch tool was too good for their Elements users, though the tool is available in their vastly more expensive professional software.
So I wasn't surprised, when going from 12 to 15, that Adobe had removed their "set in" and "set out" buttons. With a single click you could define the start and end points of whatever video clip you were editing. That was apparently deemed too convenient for the user, so now performing that function requires navigating a series of right click menus or using keyboard shortcuts.
I'm confident that by the time Adobe creates Premiere Elements 20, the program will be nothing but a JPEG of the programmers laughing at you and advertising a subscription to their creative suite.
But that's a problem for another time. For the moment at least it seems like I've finally reached the end of the tunnel.
When I started this upgrade, I had only anticipated getting a new motherboard, CPU and RAM for my machine. Since then I've also installed a new cooling unit, replaced two hard drives, upgraded the operating system, and updated my video editing software.
I don't know if it would have been cheaper to just buy a whole new machine, but it certainly would have been faster and less frustrating.
Travis Fischer is a news writer for Mid-America Publishing and hopes he didn't just jinx the heck out of his PC.

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